The dimensionality of episodic images

Vishnu Sreekumar, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University (OSU)

Yuwen Zhuang, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ohio State University (OSU)

Simon Dennis, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University (OSU)

Mikhail Belkin, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ohio State University (OSU)

Abstract

Previous studies (Doxas, Dennis, & Oliver, 2010) show that
natural language discourse exhibits a two-scale structure with
a lower dimension at short distances and larger dimension
at long distances. We attempt to search for the source of
this constraint in the visual input that goes into forming
episodic experiences in human beings. This information is
assumed to be approximated well by images captured by a
Microsoft Research SenseCam that our subjects used. The
hypothesis is that if the same two scale structure is observed
here, the constraint is possibly not one that is imposed by the
cognitive system. We use and contrast two methods by which
images can be represented: the traditional color histogram and
a more recently developed color correlogram method. The
color correlogram is established to work better for our current
purposes. We observe hints of a two scale structure in the correlation
dimension plots but these are not conclusive.